I don't think it is an expectation of perfection that is the difference here. Male skaters perform in a free skate for 4:30 +/- 10 seconds and are limited to eight jumping passes. Saturday night, LeBron James played for over 39 minutes and took 22 shots. With defenders trying to stop him. It isn't exactly comparable. The comparison would be what percentage can LeBron get on the court alone in four and half minutes. I guarantee you it would be better than the 59% he shot Saturday night.

And, btw, punters miss field goals because they are punters and punts are different than field goals.

LeBron James has the luxury of time-outs, breaks every quarter, substitutions, and guys taking free throws to rest. A 4.5 minute is non-stop and requires a lot of precision and stamina... some have equated it to playing 3 periods of straight hockey. Obviously basketball requires a lot of different things when being defended and having to strategize and be precise with your shots and passes, but there are still a lot of breaks. 39 minutes is a LOT of minutes though for any basketball player.

The issue is not insulting the general publics sensibilities. If someone falls twice and bests the skater who fell one once, there must be a clear easily understood and demonstrable reason.

Yup. It's usually some combination of higher base values for the program as a whole, higher average GOEs on the successful elements, and higher average PCS. It's important for these reasons to be clearly communicated to the general public.

Even if there are changes to the fall penalties, or changes to the specifics of base values or GOEs or PCS, there will still sometimes be occasions when the best skater falls more than once and still deserves more points overall than the next-best skater, who fell once or not at all (or once in the short program and was far behind going into the long).

Sometimes the next-best skater will fall the same number of times as the best skater, and you'd have to go down the ranks by several places to find someone who didn't fall, despite not being nearly as good overall.

So it will never be possible to devise rules that will make it impossible for a skater who falls more than once to win. At best, the rules can make it less likely by penalizing multiple falls further and by building in some kind of reward for "clean" programs.

But what looks clean, or what looks disruptive, to casual viewers will not always be the same as what judges focus on. So I think it's important to communicate better to the viewers what else the judges are looking at and not give the incorrect impression that lack of falls is/should be the most important consideration.

The system can be kept simple or made painfully complex. Simple is generally better

But not so simple as to include only skills that are obvious to the untutored eye and ignoring everything that's important to accepted definitions of good skating.

It would be just as simple to just make a loud/large font announcement to the public at all events to the effect that Skaters earn credit for the difficulty and quality of everything they attempt, they lose points for mistakes both obvious and subtle, and falls do not negate the value of everything else completed in the rest of the program.

That's a fairly simple statement -- if it were repeated often enough, people would stop expecting number of falls to be the most important determinant of who deserves to win.

Originally Posted by Ziggy

That's because quads have been overvalued in response to much fewer skaters attempting them and Lysacek's 'controversial' Olympics win.

What nobody seemed to understand at the time was that IJS meant skaters had to start paying attention to steps, spins and program construction as a whole, for the first time ever. And this obviously affected their jumps. With time, we probably would have seen more quad attempts.

I could still see arguments to make quads more worth of attempting but I think ISU has gone too far and increased the values too much.

So the issue here isn't the fall deduction. It's quads being worth way too many points.

Yes. Or at least, unsuccessful quads are worth too many points. But maybe successful ones just as much, in that they can build up enough of a cushion that the skater can then afford to fall on other elements.

This topic has come up most often in relation to the men's event for that reason. But it still applies in other disciplines.